Carl Vine
Carl Vine AO is one of Australia's best-known and most often performed composers, with an orchestral catalogue of eight symphonies and thirteen concertos. His piano music is played widely around the world, and recordings of his work appear on more than seventy albums across the major streaming services.
He has written extensively for chamber ensembles as well as for film, television, dance and theatre. Although primarily a composer of modern art music, he has also arranged the Australian National Anthem and written music for the Closing Ceremony of the Olympic Games in Atlanta in 1996.
Born in Perth, he studied piano with Stephen Dornan and composition with John Exton at the University of Western Australia. After moving to Sydney in 1975 he worked for decades as a freelance pianist and composer with ensembles, theatre and dance companies.
Among his best-known scores are the Piano Sonata (1990), Poppy (1978) for the Sydney Dance Company, and the Choral Symphony (No. 6, 1996) for the West Australian Symphony Orchestra. His first six symphonies appear on the ABC Classics album Carl Vine: The Complete Symphonies with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Much of his chamber music is gathered on three catalogue albums: Carl Vine: Chamber Music, Vol. 1 (TP013), Carl Vine: Chamber Music, Vol. 2 (TP120) and Carl Vine: The Piano Music 1990–2006 (TP190).
From 2000 until 2019 he was Artistic Director of Musica Viva Australia. In that role he also directed the Huntington Estate Music Festival from 2006 and the Musica Viva Festival in Sydney from 2008. He has been Senior Lecturer in Composition at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music since 2014. Later works include Five Intermezzi for solo piano, Piano Sonata No. 4, Symphony No. 8 The Enchanted Loom for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, and the trombone concerto Five Hallucinations for the Chicago and Sydney Symphony Orchestras. In 2014 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO). Further information is at carlvine.com.
Artist's website: www.carlvine.com
Press quotes
... Vine is a major talent just waiting to be discovered here in the Old World. 'Radically tonal' (his phrase), the music is accessible but vital, richly coloured with a true, distinctive gift for melody, and somehow fresher than most current European writing.
A formidably equipped musician with a passion for jazz and avant garde experimentation. Vine is clearly one of the most talented young composers working anywhere. His orchestral scores such as the compressed and brilliantly inventive MicroSymphony define and inhabit a unique musical world; his Piano Sonata of 1990 is one of the most significant works in the form since the great Piano Sonata of Elliott Carter.
A major talent ... someone capable of breaking genuinely new ground and getting things to grow in it.
Carl Vine is featured on the following titles
Mantras and Night Flowers
One can be sure that Australian music might be finally coming of age when one record label can contemplate a third recording of a recent piano work – Carl Vine's magnificent Piano Sonata No. 1 is now released for the third time by Tall Poppies.
Alternating Currents
Bernadette Harvey’s debut solo CD on Tall Poppies presents one of Australia’s finest pianists: scarily accurate technique, a fearless ear for nuance, and a gift for making a composer’s intentions clear at first hearing.
Carl Vine: The Piano Music 1990–2006
This is the first complete recorded collection of Carl Vine's piano music, including the world premiere of The Anne Landa Preludes (2006). Michael Kieran Harvey, who premiered both sonatas and the Piano Concerto, brings a long association with the composer to these performances.
Musica Viva: 60th Anniversary, Selected Commissions 1975–2004
This disc marks sixty years of Musica Viva Australia’s work commissioning Australian chamber music. Since 1945 the organisation had helped bring nearly a hundred new works into being, building a distinctive national repertoire. A full list of those commissions is included with the CD.
Carl Vine: Mythologia
Mythologia amazed audiences and critics alike at its Olympic Arts Festival debut in Sydney in 2000. Graeme Murphy's choreography was breathtaking, Carl Vine's score won widespread acclaim, and the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Choir's live performance placed the group firmly among international ensembles worth hearing.
The Potato Factory
The Channel 7 mini-series of Bryce Courtenay’s The Potato Factory screened in Australia in July 2000. With Lisa McCune, Ben Cross and Sonia Todd, it is a ripper yarn of Dickensian London and early colonial life.
Composer
Carl Vine: Chamber Music, Vol. 2
World premiere recordings of Carl Vine's Second Piano Sonata, played by Michael Kieran Harvey, and Third String Quartet, by the Tall Poppies Quartet (John Harding, Georges Lentz, Esther van Stralen and David Pereira).
Co-Producer
Carl Vine: Inner World
Written especially for David Pereira, Inner World pairs live cello with a tape part drawn only from his own playing. Vine transforms that material into an integrated accompaniment. Australia's first classical CD single.
Producer
The Battlers: Music from the TV Mini-Series
This music originated as the soundtrack for a television mini-series. Easy on the ear, it shows Vine as a consummate film composer, with a gift for mood that is an outstanding feature of the disc.
Carl Vine: Chamber Music, Vol. 1
A first gathering of Carl Vine's chamber works from the 1980s. Intelligence, wit and feeling sit side by side, played by leading Australian musicians, many of them in pieces written for them.
Producer: Executive Producer
Compositions by Carl Vine also appear on
Electric Cello
David Pereira plays solo Australian cello works, each scored for cello with pre-recorded tape or delay. The Wesley-Smith and Ford pieces are world premiere recordings.
Fantasies
Dutch-born Esther van Stralen, principal violist of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, shapes this recital from her own wide-ranging tastes: earlier works on baroque viola sit beside a broad sweep of twentieth-century solo writing.
Graeme Murphy's Body of Work: A Retrospective
For 25 years the Sydney Dance Company under Graeme Murphy dominated Australian dance. Murphy made it a mission to commission new Australian scores; this disc gathers some of the most successful, issued to mark a national tour celebrating his work.
Lift Off: Australian Piano Music for Children
An engaging collection of piano music by Australian composers written to spark young imaginations. Elpis Liossatos, an Australian pianist then living in Greece, brings charm and enthusiasm to these performances.
An Australian Collection
Nineteen tracks drawn from the Tall Poppies catalogue, chosen to show the range and depth of Australian composition and performance across the label’s first decade.
Composer
A Garden of Earthly Delights
Three Australian concertos in exuberant performances by the Australian Youth Orchestra, conductor Diego Masson, and soloists David Nuttall, Ian Munro and David Pereira.
Mere Bagatelles
As an overview of Australian composition in the 90s, this CD could not be bettered: a musicianly survey of short piano works, with performances of real authority.
Watt Ever
Electronic music drawn from twenty years of WATT concert presentations. Australia’s only organisation regularly staging audio-visual and electronic works, WATT gathers tape, computer and live-electronic pieces spanning that period, bringing several composers to CD for the first time.
Spinning: New Australian Flute Music
Geoffrey Collins has single-handedly shaped the Australian flute repertoire, and this is his third solo recording. Five of these works were written for him, and they show how freely composers respond to his playing.
Christmas under Capricorn
The Australian Youth Orchestra, conducted by Graham Abbott, plays nineteen Christmas carols arranged for orchestra by Australian composers. Two carols appear in paired settings, inviting comparison. Listenable festive music, easy to give as a gift.
Café Concertino
The Australia Ensemble, Australia's foremost chamber group and in residence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, presents commissioned and core Australian chamber works.
Carl Vine also appears on
The Edge
This music was written for an IMAX film about the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. The film concerns itself with the environment, the ancient Aboriginal presence and the recently discovered prehistoric Wollemi Pines.
Antarctica: The Film Music
Australia's first IMAX film, scored by Nigel Westlake with music that captures the awesome spaces of the ice and the delights of the local fauna. Soloists include David Pereira (cello), Dene Olding (violin), Timothy Kain (guitar) and Christine Douglas (soprano).